No, not recently, not by a long shot. Paul Bergman found a piece of torn and twisted stainless steel on Grandpa’s Knob 4 May 1990 while he was constructing microwave stations in northern New England for Raytheon.
Bergman was no stranger to Grandpa’s Knob—or to wind energy. Grandpa’s Knob was the site of America’s largest wind turbine until the 1980s. While an engineering student in the 1970s he made a pilgrimage to the top of the mountain to honor the failed project to harness the wind some thirty years before.
In 1978, Bergman worked for Herman Drees’ Pinson, an erstwhile manufacturer of what Drees called a “cycloturbine” or articulating VAWT. In 1984 Bergman ended up in Tehachapi working for “Available Jones,” one of the colorful characters of the period.
Neither Bergman nor I know where this piece of metal came from or what it’s called. For lack of a better term, the word “stringer” comes to mind or “strap,” but I have no clue what it is. I surmise that it likely came from the one massive stainless steel blade that flew off the machine at 3.10 am 26 March 1941, ending the experiment.[1] The turbine was then dismantled.
I plan to ship the metal strip to the York County History Center where the remainder of the Smith-Putnam records are archived.
Below are photos of the metal strap and two photos of the Smith-Putnam blade being assembled at the Budd Company plant in Philadelphia.
[1] Palmer Cosslet Putnam, Power from the Wind, Reprinted 1974 (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1948), page 131.
